Within the confines of a small, ovoid frames, Caroline Dewison, of A House of Wonders, crafts miniature scenes laden with remarkable detail. Building upon previous mystical vistas inspired by the woodlands surrounding her studio in Warrington, England, the artist’s most recent ventures forge a deeper path toward the otherworldly.
Hovering above minuscule streams and valleys, UFOs contrast sharply against Dewison’s hand-painted nature scenes. The artist has been fascinated by the possibility of beings on other planets since childhood and continues to explore this speculation.
“In my lifetime, it’s gone from there being just us to scientists finding hundreds and thousands of exoplanets, many with the possibility of life,” she explains. “I would like to think that we’re not alone.” Within each diorama, the flying saucers are cleverly affixed to jut outward from two-dimensional backgrounds, furthering a sense of depth.
Along with revisiting her lifelong interest in the extraterrestrial, the artist has also rekindled her relationship with automata. She relishes problem-solving and the logistical aspects of constructing kinetic pieces, sharing, “I love working out how to create a moving piece of art and really enjoy engineering the mechanism to add life to my work.” As a result, the tiny UFOs make a dynamic appearance as well, rotating and drifting above foreign crop circles and thickets of pine.
While Dewison still mainly works with laser-cut plywood, Jesmonite, acrylic paint, clay, and a 3D-printing pen, she is also working on constructing new designs for frames.
A busy year is ahead of the artist. Dewison’s work is currently on view as part of Small Works | Big Impact at Momentum Gallery in Asheville, and later this month, her dioramas will be featured in the Oddities and Curiosities Expo in Melbourne with Beinart Gallery. Find Dewison’s miniatures for sale in her shop, A House of Wonders, and keep an eye on Instagram for new work, upcoming shows, and more.
For more than a decade, we’ve been following the intricate dioramas by Hari & Deepti (previously). The Mumbai-based husband and wife are known for their elaborate narratives of cut and layered paper, which they tuck inside frames and backlight with soft LEDs. In recent years, the duo has gravitated toward tiny, delicate patterns while making the overall scenes more minimal.
Their new exhibition, Forgotten Places of Beings and Things, opens today at Heron Arts in San Francisco and presents a collection of enchanting works. Minuscule figures navigate lush woodlands and windswept dunes that, when illuminated, appear like worlds of magic and intrigue.
“The Walk to Two Ponds”
“What amazes us about the paper-cut light boxes is the dichotomy of these pieces in their lit and unlit states. The contrast is so stark that it has this mystical effect on the viewers,” the artists say.
Forgotten Places of Beings and Things is on view through January 25. Hari & Deepti recently published an illustrated children’s book titled The Seekers, and you can follow the latest in their collaborative practice on Instagram.
“The Stories They Told Us”“Through the Wind Swept Field”“A Forest Structure”“Time Keepers 1”Detail of “A Forest Structure”“Under the Vine Forest”“Under the Vine Forest”Detail of “It Passes and We Stay”
This sequence of photos shows a woman's parents waving goodbye to her. She took the photographs over 27 years when leaving their home. The images are a beautiful timelapse until they reach the inevitable conclusion and break your heart. The ritual of taking goodbye pictures was partially to make leaving less sad, but the result is brutally sad. — Read the rest
Have you ever thought about how your bacon, almond milk, or fish ends up on your table? In our globalized economy, fresh fruit can be shipped from one hemisphere to another to stock grocery store shelves regardless of the season, and many of us enjoy nearly endless choices of cereals, vegetables, meats, and snacks. But a striking number of young children don’t realize that processed foods like chicken nuggets and cheese don’t come from plants. How does a hot dog come to be? Where does our food come from?
Photographer George Steinmetz offers a remarkable look at landscapes, initiatives, and customs that shape how the world eats. His new book, Feed the Planet, chronicles a decade spent documenting food production in more than three dozen countries on six continents, including 24 U.S. states.
Soybean harvest, Fazenda Piratini, Bahia, Brazil
More than 40 percent of our planet’s surface has been molded and tended to produce crops and livestock. From idiosyncratic 16th-century farm plots in rural Poland to Texas cattle feed lots to a large-scale shrimp processing operation in India, food production is rarely observed on this scale. “He takes us places that most of us never see, although our very lives depend on them,” says a statement for the book.
Studies have shown that large-scale agriculture and factory farming send greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in an amount constituting nearly one-third of all human-caused emissions. The ongoing climate crisis can be traced in large part to fertilizers that release nitrous oxide; deforestation caused by farm expansion that adds more carbon dioxide into the air; and emissions from manure management, burning, fuel use, and more.
From a striking aerial vantage point, Steinmetz captures the beauty, ingenuity, and stark reality of factories, aquaculture, family farms, food pantries, and sprawling agricultural operations. He elucidates how staples like wheat, rice, vegetables, fruits, meat, and fish reach both domestic and international tables, tapping into “one of humanity’s deepest needs, greatest pleasures, and most pressing challenges.”
Purchase a signed copy on the photographer’s website, or grab one on Bookshop.
Mauritania was a country of pastoral nomads when it gained independence from France in 1960, but it has since become a nation of fishermen as well, with hundreds of pirogues lining the beach of the capital of Nouakchott. The official annual national landings are around 900,000 tons, but researchers who include illegal or unreported hauls put the catch at more than twice that. With many fish stocks moving north and farther offshore as sea temperatures rise, the competition for fish turned violent in 2023 in neighboring Senegal, where fishermen from the town of Kayar burned drift nets illegally set by fishermen from Mboro in the Kayar Marine Protected Area. In response, the Mboro fishermen attacked Kayar boats with gasoline bombs, killing one boy and wounding twenty others. Government intervention prevented an outright civil war between fishing groups, but tensions are endemic to communities that have grown dependent on declining natural resources. Some 600,000 Senegalese are now employed in fisheries. Fish are a primary source of protein for both Mauritania and Senegal. Working one shrimp at a time, women workers at Avanti Frozen Foods in Yerravaram, Andhra Pradesh, India, can de-shell and de-vein up to 44 tons of farmed shrimp per day from the company’s 1,600 acres of shrimp ponds. Avanti is one of the largest shrimp exporters in India, which dominates the global shrimp export market. About 75 percent of its frozen shrimp is exported to the U.S., with Costco being one of its major customers. Shrimp is the most valuable traded marine product in the world, with an estimated market value of nearly $47 billion in 2022.Modern cowboys conduct wellness checks on horseback at the Wrangler Feedyard in Tulia, Texas, home to around fifty thousand head. Wrangler is one of ten feedlots in Texas and Kansas owned by Amarillo-based Cactus Feeders that collectively can provide feed and care for a half million cattle. At the Wrangler facility, cattle arrive at around 750 pounds, then spend five to six months eating some 20 pounds of dry feed and fodder each day until they reach slaughter weight. Cactus sends more than a million head to slaughter each year, typically to the Tyson beef processing plants in Amarillo, Texas, and Holcomb, Kansas. According to the Texas Farm Bureau, there are more cattle on feedlots within 150 miles of Amarillo than any other area in the world.Just as almond milk has displaced cartons of dairy milk in the grocery store, an old Aermotor windmill that once pumped water for cattle now looms over rows of almond trees and beehives that replaced them near Oakdale, California. The rising popularity of nut milks and almonds for snacking both in the U.S. and overseas has led California growers to triple their acreage in almonds since 1995. Almond orchards now cover 2,500 square miles in the state, growing 80 percent of the global supply and worth more than $5 billion in annual sales. Like cattle, almond trees need copious amounts of water—about 1.1 gallons per nut—as well as hardworking honeybees to pollinate the crop, both of which are in increasingly short supply.A few of the 2,000 workers at the CP Group’s chicken processing plant in Jiangsu, China, prepare broilers for the domestic market, including fast food chains like McDonald’s, KFC, and Burger King. On a typical day they process 200,000 birds and double that number prior to Chinese holidays.Men and women of all races, classes, and religions enjoy a free hot meal at the Sri Harmandir Sahib, better known as the Golden Temple, in Amritsar in Punjab State, India. The gurdwara is the holiest site of the Sikhs, as well as the world’s largest langar, or community kitchen, which provides a free, hot vegetarian meal to 100,000 people, 24/7, all year. The meals consist of roti, or Indian flatbread, rice, a curried vegetable dish, and dal, or lentil soup, which is cooked in giant wood-fired cauldrons in four-ton batches paid for by donations and cooked and ladled out mostly by volunteers. Such langars are a part of every Sikh temple and serve an estimated seven million free meals around the world as an act of charity to all visitors each day.
Photo By Joaquin Corchero/Europa Press via Getty Images
Netflix’s push into live sports has snagged another major event. Today the streamer announced that it has acquired US streaming rights for the FIFA Women’s World Cup in both 2027 and 2031. FIFA is calling the deal “a landmark announcement for women’s football.”
The 2027 edition of the tournament will take place in Brazil, while the following World Cup doesn’t yet have a host nation. The Netflix coverage in the US will include both English- and Spanish-language broadcasts, and the streamer says that it will be creating more coverage in addition to the live matches:
Studio shows and top-tier talent will supplement coverage with commentary and entertainment. And in the lead-up to the tournament, Netflix will produce exclusive documentary programming spotlighting the top players, their journeys, and the explosion of the sport around the globe.
It’s all part of a growing trend of streaming services looking to live events — and sports in particular — as the next frontier. Apple has gone all-in in MLS, Amazon airs NHL games and is getting into the NBA next year, while the likes of Max, Roku, and pretty much every service have gotten into sports in some way.
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